"Researcher Do?"

She down from the green light above the scanner that told her she could go through. The secretary sitting at the desk was a darker skinned young woman. Kyungsoo didn't remember her name - likely had never spoken to her before - and nodded her way. The woman flushed, but mustered her courage.

"Are you okay?"

Kyungsoo blinked. "Of course. Why do you ask?"

"I don't know. You just look really . . . put out? Kinda like you think something bad's about to happen?"

"What's your name?"

"Kim Hyojung. It's usually just . . . Hyolyn, though."

Kyungsoo nodded and stepped into her little office space. "Nice to meet you, then, Hyolyn. Did you just start working here?"

"Yeah. I was transferred here with three of my friends." She smiled and it was wide, cute and endearing in an almost Chanyeol fashion. "All four of us start today."

Kyungsoo leant against her desk, her small frame almost sitting on the edge. "And who are they?"

"Well, Yoon Bora, Kim Dasom and Kang Jihyun, though we call her Soyou."

Kyungsoo blinked. "Do you nickname everyone?"

Hyolyn flushed again, her dark skin and black hair not enough to hide it. "We were brought here as secretaries and office workers. To liven it up, we read some of the unrestricted patient files and found that some of them have codenames. Their projects have little nicknames too, so we made it kind of like a little game."

"I don't fully understand what you mean."

"Well, for example, we used to work for Human Engineering. There were a couple of projects going on, but one of the main ones was Project: Rovix. We found out by reading some of the unrestricted reports that the scientists and researchers working on it commonly called them 'VIXX'. The oldest one in there was a woman named Cha Hakyeon, but they just called her 'N' in the files."

"Do you notice things like that happening in this department?"

"I'm going to be honest, I haven't even been here a full shift yet, though . . . " She pulled away and shuffled backward some. "Dasom! Come up here for a minute."

A pale, thin woman with shoulder-length straight hair walked around the corner. "What's up, Hyolyn?"

"You've been reading through this project, right? What's the shorthand?"

"I'm assuming this is for Project: Exhume?"

"Yeah."

"I find the project is often codenamed 'EXO'. Not all the subejcts have nicknames, but almost all of them do. So far, the only ones I found that haven't are Baekhyun and Chanyeol."

That was news. Kyungsoo knew each subject had an unofficial 'name' so that the sheer amount of clinical numbering in a facility like this wouldn't get too confusing, but she didn't know it had extended so far. "What do they call Oh Sehun?"

Dasom met her gaze and seemed to weigh in her head whether Kyungsoo was safe to tell. Since she was inside the barrier, Dasom seemed to come to the conclusion that she was okay. "Oh Sehun? I think she's number eleven and that's . . . Shixiun. I don't know yet why half the names are in Mandarin when she's self-evidently Korean, but hey. I'm just a secretary."

Hyolyn rolled her eyes. "Thanks, Dasom."

The other woman saluted and disappeared back behind the wall.

"She's our file rat." Hyolyn explained. "She spends most of her time back in the actual cabinets and everything sorting and working through any and all paper files we get."

"I was wondering why such a small department would need four secretaries."

Hyolyn shrugged. "Well, secretary isn't the best term for us. I mean, I just do check-ins and look pretty, but Dasom is our paper diver, Bora is a server genuis and Soyou handles electronic sorting and email procedure."

"Busy women."

"Sometimes." Hyolyn shrugged. "We're good when its busy, whcih is when it counts, right? Anyway, I've wasted a lot of your time already and you have a shift to get to, right?"

"Indeed I do." Kyungsoo straightened herself out.

"Hey." Hyolyn winked at her, smile infectious. "Don't be a stranger."

Kyungsoo actually giggled. "I'll give it a shot."

Amber was gone when she entered and the other researchers had dispersed. In Amber's report, she left a little note that Rebecca had been replaced with a woman named Song Qian.

For simplicity's sake, I'm calling her Victoria from now on because that's how she introduced herself. Amber wrote. I only found out her name because of her employee file anyway. I'll just add the alias in later to make it easier on the search engine.

Kyungsoo nodded at the tablet and clicked the room into a circle once more. 

"How was your first night alone with Amber?" She asked them, sitting down with her clipboard. She was staring pointedly at Luhan.

"Okay, so she's not terrible." Luhan muttered. 

"I like her." Sehun commented. She ran a hand through her short black hair, kept trimmed by the scientists, presumably, when they took her in for physicals. "She's kinda boyish, but in a good way."

"She's sweet." Yifan commented, seated against the glass. His head would be on her thigh if it didn't separate them. "She reminds me of sporty girls I went to school with in Canada."

"Did you try to stay up the night with her?"

"About four hours." Minseok replied. "Then our regular sleep time rolled in and we just kept to the routine."

"I slept a little more. Five hours this time." Luhan admitted. "It felt better to have someone trustworthy around."

"Jongin reminded him that you said to play nice with Amber and then he calmed down." Zitao explained. "He didn't do it on his own."

Kyungsoo nodded. "That's fair. I don't expect you to trust her implicitly or immediately just because I said to."

"You're worth listening to." Junmyeon said. "If you say something or someone is worth it, then they are. Nothing more to it."

"Well, I'm glad you trust me this much."

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. She had a couple of dinners with the secretary girls, who had taken to calling themselves Sistar, and got to know them better. Dasom warmed up to her relatively quickly, both of them taking to the straightforward talk between them. Hyolyn and Bora turned out to be two of the funniest people she'd ever been around and Soyou was very quiet and level-headed, but not afraid to smile or laugh along with her group.

"I don't understand how you don't have more friends." Dasom insisted at their table in the cafeteria. Kyungsoo hadn't even known these girls had a place specific to them before this.

"I never made time for anyone else. I take my work with the project very seriously and I've come to realize that maybe it was a bit too seriously. It's a hard habit to break, though, since I've been doing this for so long."

"How long have you been down here?" Soyou asked. 

"Maybe ten years? I've been on Project: Exhume for seven at the very least. There was a year-long planning and prep stage before we actually got the subjects in for ourselves."

"No , really?" Bora interjected, almost spitting out her drink in surprise. Hyolyn raised a disgusted eyebrow, but otherwise said nothing about it. 

"Yeah. I did some other preliminary work for other projects before too, when there wasn't enough staff everywhere."

"What kind of work?" Dasom's shrewd gaze was steady on her, but Kyungsoo didn't feel trapped. Dasom was a sharp woman and she was extremely blunt, but she wasn't the secretive or destructive type. Knowledge for knowledge's sake, more often than not.

"Basics. Lab schematics, machinery requirements and elementary systems needed for the data processing."

"Holy . How much did you major in?" Hyolyn asked. 

"Biomedical engineering and biochemical engineering were my joint majors and I took extra summer courses in computer sciences and systems administration."

"You people are all nuts." Hyolyn laughed. "I took a summer course in secretarial skills, took the first job that got a response and found myself here four years ago." 

"Funny how all this works, isn't it?" Soyou wondered. "All of us with different backgrounds and everything and yet, all of us wind up piled here together today. Think there might be a reason?"

"I don't know." Bora countered, lookign thoughtfully up to the ceiling. "What does our D.O. have to say?"

"D.O.?" Kyungsoo looked amongst them. "Should I ask?"

Hyolyn grinned. "You're one of us now, honey. You get a nickname too, though I would think you're more part of EXO than Sistar, though we don't mind to borrow you every now and again."

"Okay, D.O. not knowing how fun works aside, what do you think of Soyou's idea?" Bora insisted. 

She looked amongst all the women, innocent and happy. "I think we'll only know whether it was on purpose or not with hindsight."

"And that's that." Dasom declared. "Now, we have to let Kyungsoo sleep and the four of us have work to do. Let's get going."